How can publishers use their analytics data to save themselves?

Continuously dropping advertising rates are the reason why so many print magazines and newspapers are struggling and disappearing from the media landscape. Publishers themselves have played a big role in the decline of ad prices by not making enough of an effort to track data about their sites’ visitors. Since the ad networks that control most of the available advertising real estate don’t share enough analytics data with publishers for them to understand which of its pages are most valuable, the publishers are left a weaker position to argue the value of their content. This forces them to give more visual space to advertising, which in turn drives the price of ads down even further.

Ad blockers might be just as daunting to publishers as dropping ad prices; our blog post on ad blocking contains advice on how to start planning for a future in which ads will be blocked easier and more often than in the past.